


A Date with Wesley Ayres

by NightsMistress



Category: The Archived
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:18:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's three weeks on, and Mackenzie still doesn't know how to go on dates with Keepers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Date with Wesley Ayres

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ryuutchi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ryuutchi/gifts).



> I had actually never read this book before I picked up this assignment. I'm glad I did, as it's really cute.
> 
> I hope it addresses the itch!
> 
> Also thank you to VelvetMouse who betaed a story for a book she had never read because I pleaded so persistently. You're the best! ♥

“Come _on_ , just assign me one,” I can hear a male voice say as I enter the Archive, juggling three coffees in a cardboard carrier. “I can look after a little kid.”

I have to try not to smile. The Archive is, despite my regular visits, still as breathtakingly beautiful as it was the first time I visited with Da. It is, however, notably a _quiet_ place. The signs suggesting quiet are almost unnecessary, given that the glass and pale woods and the sheer presence of the Archive stuns me to silence or at least hushed voices most times. 

Then again, Wesley is always loud and today is no exception, as he gestures at Roland to prove his point. He’s wheedling, and judging by Roland’s expression, it’s not working. I could have told him that there wasn’t a Librarian around that would give in to that tone of voice. What I haven’t understood since I received the summons from Roland is why he wanted to see both of us. I doubt we’re in trouble, as it’s only been a few weeks since Wes was injured and I haven’t had time to break the rules.

“Miss Bishop,” Roland says in greeting. “I’m glad you could make it.” He looks at the coffees I’m carrying and his eyebrows rise. I can sympathize. Mom thought corporate branding would be a good idea. I think magenta isn’t a good color for coffee shops, but I couldn’t argue the case too hard. The coffee shop idea is the longest that mom has really stuck with any of her whims. It might even be a decision, the first real one she’s made since Ben died.

“Mac!” Wes says, turning around and startling me from my thoughts. He still looks tired and worn, and no amount of eyeliner or sunny cheerfulness can mask the dark shadows under his eyes, but he smiles happily when he sees me. “Which one’s mine?”

“The one with your name?” I suggest, putting the cardboard carrier on a nearby table. “Roland, I hope you like flat whites on the house.”

“I’ll need it after dealing with Mister Ayres,” Roland says, taking the one marked ‘Roland’. He sounds run down and as old as he actually is, as opposed to as old he looks. It’s still strange to realize that Roland, the strange young man who wears red Chucks, is a History who only didn’t retire because of me. I’m not sure what to make of that, so I don’t.

“It’ll be worse afterward,” I tell him instead, with a wry smile. “Wes is determined to rot his teeth.”

Wes takes his coffee with five sugars and a caramel flavor syrup, which answered once and for all how he can be so perky most days. Today is proving to be no exception, with him humming happily after sipping his coffee. 

“You remembered,” he says.

“I’m not sure how anyone could forget,” I say. “You’re a diabetic in the making.”

“I’m sweet enough,” he says with a grin, and Roland looks like he wishes he could roll his eyes, but he’s trying to be the adult and therefore is too dignified for that. I’m not, and roll them hard enough for both of us.

“So what’s this about?” I say, taking a seat and sipping from my own coffee. I was up at the crack of dawn dealing with the latest History, a little boy who silently took my hand in his own and let me lead him to the nearest Records door. He was younger than Ben was, but the way that he tilted his head as he examined the door to Records was achingly familiar. I’d wanted to cry afterward. Instead I went back and scrubbed the coffee shop benches until my fingers burned, and then I snuck out with my coffees to this mysterious meeting.

“Now that Mister Ayres has recovered somewhat,” Roland begins. He pauses as Wes’ head jerks up with a start, lips parted and eyes wide with hope. “I’d like you to assist him for the next few weeks covering his territory.”

“You sure?” I say dubiously. It’s only partially an act. I still remember the horrible feeling of Wes’ limp weight pushing me to the floor and his blood soaking my clothes. I try and lighten the mood though. “I can still knock him onto his back every time.”

“ _Mac_ ,” Wes says. It’s a mixture of a plea and a moan. “You could do that before.”

Roland is looking down at his coffee, clearly trying to repress laughter.

“I suppose, though, that I could babysit him,” I go on. “He is delicate, after all.”

“Like a beautiful sculpture,” Wes agrees. 

“I thought you were going to disagree with me,” I say, feigning surprise. 

Wes rolls his eyes, which apparently involves sighing and letting his head loll backward at the same time to emphasize his point. “If it means that I’m back on, I’m willing to agree to _anything_.”

“A dangerous suggestion,” Roland murmurs into his coffee cup. “I’d reconsider that, if I were you.”

Fortunately for Wes, he’s saved from being teased by Roland as a result of some Librarian administrative thing that requires his attention. I can’t quite stifle my giggles as I leave, and Wes just shrugs philosophically before following me.

The Narrows are quiet today. I’ve had enough excitement in there to last me a lifetime, but at least a History would give Wes and I something to talk about rather than what we are to each other. I look at Wes, who shrugs and puts his hand into his pocket, before pulling out his bo staff and extending it. I shake my head at this; I would have thought that someone who is still recovering from the last time a Keeper -- even a dead one -- used a weapon in the Narrows would be more reluctant to have one on him. Shows what I know.

“So,” Wes says. “Got any Histories to do?”

“No,” I say. “I did him before I came.”

He looks disappointed at this. “Oh well,” he says. “My territory isn’t as busy as yours, but we’ll have something soon.”

I know that Roland said that Wes is better now, but there’s only one way to be sure. A few weeks ago I would never have done this, but a few weeks ago Wes hadn’t been bleeding to death in my arms. The memory makes me daring.

Touching Wesley isn’t something I do often, despite his claims otherwise. However, today I touch the back of his hand with my finger, a light graze that barely skims the surface of his skin. It’s enough though for me to pick up the usual rock band that makes up Wes, though today it’s fuzzy, like hearing it through earplugs. 

“You could have just asked,” Wes says. I look up and he’s smiling crookedly at me. Though he doesn’t remember it, I remember him promising that he won’t ever lie to me and I feel guilty. I’m trying to be better when it comes to honesty, but I still think that Wes’ approach to life is far messier than Da’s.

“How are you feeling?” I say instead of _I’m sorry_. I’m not good at apologies. I never have been.

“Sore,” he says. “But the painkillers are great.”

“Oh, _that’s_ what that was,” I say, my eyebrows rising in spite of myself. “I was wondering why everything was so muffled.”

“Yep,” Wes says. “Apparently stomachs are terrible places to store knives.”

“You’ll have to remember that for next time.”

“You’ll have to remind me,” he says. “Just in case.”

“How long will it take to heal?”

“Another three weeks,” he says.

I wince. It’s been three weeks already. The first week Wes tired easily, and would move from chair to chair when he could. The last week, however, he’s been well enough to be fractious, which means that I had to be far more circumspect about when I was dealing with one of my assigned Histories in case he turned up in the Narrows, bo staff at the ready and asking how he could help.

“It’s the price I pay for these chiseled abs,” Wes goes on with a martyred sigh. “It’s a good thing that I suffer very prettily.”

“Yes, of course,” I say. “How could I have forgotten?”

“I do have that effect on people,” Wes agrees. It’s hard to take him seriously when he has coffee foam on the tip of his nose.

“You’re sharing,” I say, tapping the end of my nose. Wes’s crooked smile becomes more self-deprecating as he wipes it away with his free hand.

“Was that there the whole time with Roland?”

“Yep,” I say, entirely innocently. “I thought about saying something but I thought it was a Goth fashion statement.”

“You are a terrible person,” he tells me solemnly as he opens the door into the Coronado. “I’ll remember this.”

Fortunately, the foyer is empty today.

“What are your plans for the rest of the day?” he goes on to say as he locks the door behind us.

“I don’t,” I say. “When I went out I told Dad I was seeing you and he told me he’d sort it out with Mom.”

“Your dad thinks we’re on a date?” Wes says. He sounds far too amused, even under my level stare. “Let’s not disappoint him then.”

It’s not that I don’t want to go on a date with him. It’s that I don’t really know what dating involves and I don’t want to admit that to Wes. I think about calling Lindsey and asking her what to do. I’m pretty sure that that would be a mistake while he’s standing right there.

“We don’t have to,” he says, misreading my apprehension.

“No, that’s not it,” I say, trying hard to control the way my jaw shifts so that he doesn’t know I’m lying. “I’m trying to think of a place we can go where you won’t die getting there.”

“I’m wounded,” he says, clutching dramatically at his heart.

“I was there,” I reply, and he makes a face.

“A hit, a palpable hit,” he says.

“That happened too,” I say. “Is there somewhere close by?”

Wes tilts his head as he thinks. “There’s the haunted house,” he says.

I don’t know what it is about my friends and haunted houses. Linds, at least, has the excuse of not knowing what I am. Wes, on the other hand, is a Keeper like me.

“You want to go to a haunted house,” I say.

“It’s only haunted with the dead and broken dreams of teenagers from the sixties,” Wes says. “You can see my great-uncle getting stoned if you like. He’s an accountant now.”

The idea of reading a house used as a pot den is not appealing. But the idea of poking around an abandoned house is strangely interesting. It’s something M would do as an ordinary teenager, poke around empty places with a good looking boy, on a date, and it’s this that decides me.

“Fine,” I say. “Though if it is haunted you get to go first.”

“Just because I startle easy,” Wes says with a wry shake of his head, leading the way. “You’re a cruel woman, Mac.”

“Just saying it how it is,” I say to his back. I take the opportunity to observe how he moves, not completely trusting my reading. He isn’t slow and careful anymore, moving with a loose-limbed grace that I’ve seen shift into fluid combat readiness where necessary. I wonder what Da would think of him.

“Admiring me?” he calls over his shoulder. “I assure you, I’m better from the front.”

I roll my eyes and pick up my pace to draw level with him. I don’t know how he can be so vain. Maybe it’s an act? Whatever it is, it’s not quite as endearing as he thinks it is, and it’s also frustrating. Every so often he startles me with the fact that he is smarter than he looks, and I think: why don’t you talk about that instead of how pretty you are?

Maybe if I was normal I’d understand why he does it.

“How’s your reading going?” he says. “School begins soon!”

“I thought about reading at your sickbed but you didn’t have one,” I say. _Paradise Lost_ remains lost in my room. I can’t say that it wasn’t intentional. 

“I promise to contract an interesting and serious, but entirely recoverable, illness immediately,” Wes says. “Any preferences?”

“I can’t say that I’ve ever thought about it,” I say honestly.

“You should!” Wes says. “I thought about consumption for a while, until I found out it was tuberculosis.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I was seven,” he says with a wry smile. “Obviously now I know better. Also, to our left is our sad, tragic attempt at a haunted house.”

The house looks like any other run down house, though with fewer broken windows and graffiti than I’m used to. With the economic downturn, abandoned properties aren’t novel, and the Coronado is pretty run down itself. In its prime I suppose it would have been an ordinary low-set weatherboard house, but with the windows boarded up it just looked depressing. I was also not sure about the steps leading to the front door.

“You look so dubious,” Wes says. “Coming here is a proud dating tradition.”

“Is it?”

“It could be,” he says. “It’s not like coffee shops hold any allure to you, is it?”

I’m not sure that haunted houses do either, even a haunted house that I’m assured is not haunted at all. Now that I’m here looking at it it doesn’t scream ‘romance’. It screams ‘a really good place to break my neck’. Naturally, Wes looks entirely too eager to be there.

“I promise to protect you from the big bad dust patches,” he says as he opens the gate and gestures for me to enter.

“Oh, a gentleman,” I say. I don’t move any closer to the gate and his expression falters.

“We don’t have to do this,” he says. “We can go somewhere else.”

I think about it. 

“No,” I say, stepping inside. “This is fine. But I’m not looking at your great-uncle.”

Wes breathes a laugh before closing the gate behind him. “It’s okay, I’m better looking.”

Inside, the house lives up to the promise of the outside. It’s dark, dusty and the occasional hole in the floor does nothing to improve the place.

“So this is our sad attempt at a haunted house,” Wes says. “Really what happened was that a bunch of kids got high in the sixties and hallucinated all kinds of crazy stuff, but we’ll take what we can get.”

“Are you sure?” I say, skeptically. Now that I’m inside, I can’t see why anyone would want to smoke a joint in here. Fifty years ago it wouldn’t have have had character to endear it to anyone.

“Sure am,” he says. “I checked myself when I first became a Keeper.”

“Really?” I say, wrinkling my nose. “How is it that your record is unblemished and mine isn’t?”

“I don’t break the rules that matter?” Wes says with a shrug. He then surprises me by saying “There’s nothing to be sympathetic for here.”

Has he been talking to Roland? I don’t know. It could be that he’s been told that himself, but I don’t think that’s true. I know he doesn’t remember reading me, and I know that I couldn’t have told him that the reason why I let Owen get away with as much as I did was because we had dead younger siblings in common. But I’m better than that now. I know better.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to prove by doing this, but I twist my ring off and place my bare hand against the wall and pull the memories out from the wall.

I don’t go back far enough to see Wes’ great uncle, just a year, to when I can see a sharp featured boy pressing his own, black nailed hand to the wall. Younger Wes’ hair isn’t styled in spikes and there’s fewer piercings, but the thing that strikes me as the most strange is that he doesn’t have the crooked smile that I’m used to seeing. Instead, he has that abstracted, thoughtful expression that I remember Da having a few times. I think I’ve had that expression too. It’s the expression of a Keeper reading something. I’m literally reading someone read something else.

I pull myself out of the memory to Wes’ bemused stare. 

“What were you looking at?” he says. “I didn’t know that hippies were that interesting.”

“I didn’t get that far,” I say. “I didn’t know the spikes were new.”

“Oh, spying on me I see,” he says. “Now you know the truth: I have always been this good looking.”

“Hah,” I say. “I swear, a History would just have to tell you you’re pretty and you’d be putty in their hands.”

“It depends on how pretty they are,” he muses.

It’s times like this that I wish Da had had time to teach me how to keep my walls up so that I could reach across and punch Wes on the arm until he stops acting like that. Though I have to admit that I’m grateful that Wes doesn’t point out that that is exactly what happened to me, only with a healthy dollop of self-destruction.

“You’re …” I trail off and gesture with my hands.

“Amazing?” Wes offers.

“Yes, clearly,” I say. “That was obviously the word I was looking for.”

“That’s what I do,” he says cheerfully. “Help you find what you need.”

I ignore him, taking a look around the rest of the house. A number of rooms seem to be boarded off and while I could force my way through, I don’t really need to yet. The rooms I do have access to are a very old kitchen, choking on dust, what might have been a bedroom and a bathroom that is covered in graffiti. Unsurprisingly most of it is about who loves who lately.

“Oh, you’ve found the lovers wall,” Wes says behind me. “I used to bet how many of them broke up afterward.”

“Oh. Romantic,” I say. “I take it we’re not going to scribble ‘Mac and Wes were here’, right?”

“We could,” Wes says. “But normally people don’t do that on a first date.”

There’s something he’s not saying. I think about reading him the same way he read me, but there’s a very big difference between reading a wall and reading a person. Wes may be practiced in reading people but I can’t stand the thought of doing it for long, especially not like that.

I have to admit, it sucks that my first kiss was by someone who legitimately has no memory of it, and who was using it to find out what I was lying to him about. I’ve said it before, I’m terrible for lying.

“And you’ve done so many first dates?” I say instead, aiming for archly amused. It falls flat.

“Yeah,” Wes says casually. “I’ve done a few.”

“But how?”

Wes doesn’t say anything for a moment and I wonder what it is that he’s afraid to say.

“I became a Keeper older than you,” he says. “That’s why, I think, the age is sixteen. We get a chance to do that kind of thing, and I don’t think you did.” He says it carefully, waiting for me to hit him. Considering that the last time he said something negative about Da’s choice to induct me at twelve I almost strangled him, maybe it’s a reasonable precaution to take. 

I can still feel my jaw tightening.

Maybe he was right to be cautious.

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it now,” he says. “So, here we are.”

I’m saved from having to answer that by a scratching by my leg. I pull my note out to see that there’s a new History: Timothy James, 10. Judging by Wes’ action, he’s seen it too.

“Great!” he says after reading it. “Do you want to go do it now?”

“And interrupt our date?” I say.

“Pause it,” he corrects me with a wave. “Besides, we’re Keepers. If we can’t fit in our responsibilities around our lives, it’s going to suck. Now I know there’s a door around here somewhere…”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe instead of fitting my life around my duties, I need to fit the duties around my life. Maybe this _is_ normal for Keepers, fitting History hunting around dates and homework. I don’t know. It could be worth a try though.

“I’ll help you look,” I say, and begin to scan the room.


End file.
